| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Jonah Siegel. Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000. Pp. xxvii, 352. Cloth $65.00, paper $19.95.

The confluence of three elements—the rise of the museum, the emergence of the figure of the modern artist, and the evolution of the professional critic—structures Jonah Siegel's study of the nineteenth-century culture of art. What brings this literary critic to a book about visual culture is the conviction that, from the late eighteenth century on, the experience of art objects played a defining role in the history of letters. And, concomitantly, that it is in the arena of letters that the tensions of modern museum culture, often lost in the mandates of traditional disciplinary boundaries, are most available. For Siegel, the figures of the modern artist and critic are products of these tensions—particularly, the disconnect between nineteenth-century institutional aspirations to coherence and the awareness that institutional collections are shaped largely by accident and circumstance. Accordingly, Siegel's book foregoes the model of comprehensive history in favor of a study in four contiguous parts. 1

Part one, "Art and the Museum," locates the origins of a nineteenth-century culture of art in a "crisis of neoclassicism" engendered by excessive fascination with antiquity. Close readings of texts about art by J. J. Winckelmann, James Barry, and William Blake mark stages in the erosion of foundational assumptions of neoclassical theory, the result of an ever-expanding body of archaeological evidence and analysis. The figure of the modern artist, according to Siegel, is conceived within this crisis to appropriate and salvage the terms in which antiquity had been most highly valued: originality and a unified sensibility. . . .

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